88
A dirt road has been cut to within a couple days’
march of his village, Saddi, and work has begun
on a tourist trekking route that will penetrate into
the upper reaches of the valley, connecting Saddi
and its sister villages to a popular trekking area
just over a pass from the well-known circuits of
the Khumbu region. A politician has promised to
build a small airport in the area.
Kulung elders like Mauli still refer to Kath-
mandu as “Nepal,” a place apart from where
they live. In their minds the capital is a for-
eign country, a distant neighbor of their own
tiny realm. But the world around them is
changing so fast that the boundaries—and the
magic—that have long defined this ancient
community are beginning to fade away.
Mauli sits BesiDe the Fire pit in his ram-
shackle, one-room home. The mud walls, riddled
with cracks from the 7.8 magnitude earthquake
of April 2015, look as if they could cave in at any
moment. Most homes visible from his doorway
have bright blue metal roofs, but his is made of
thatched grass, a sign of his poverty. He may be
the only one of the small band of hunters allowed
to actually rip hives from the rock walls with his
own two hands—but clearly the honor does not
convey a great deal of cash.
It’s been 42 years since Mauli had the dream
that put him on this path. It came when he was
15, the night after he assisted his father with a
honey harvest for the first time.
“I saw two beautiful women,” he recalls. “Sud-
denly I found myself trapped in a spiderweb on
the side of a cliff. I was struggling to get free when
I saw a large white monkey above me. It dropped
its tail down, and the women helped me grab it.
Then the monkey lifted me up, and I escaped.”
The elders, one of them his father, told him
that the monkey was Rangkemi, the guardian
spirit of bees and monkeys—a sometimes wrath-
ful energy that inhabits dangerous places where
few humans dare to go. They assured him that he
would be guaranteed safe passage onto the cliffs,
that the spirit would not retaliate against him and
his family when he took the precious honey. On
that day Mauli shouldered the rare and difficult
burden of a honey hunter. In the decades since,
he has risked his life every spring and fall to har-
vest the sweet, mind-bending substance from the
same cliffs his father harvested a generation ago.
Mauli was born under the light of a bamboo
torch across the valley in the village of Chheskam.
It had no formal school, and his classroom was the
steep hillside terraces where he spent his youth
cutting grass and farming. Poverty and isolation
mean early death for many Kulung. Mauli had
four brothers, but two of them died; he has been
married and widowed three times, leaving him
alone to care for his four daughters, two sons, five
grandchildren, and the few other relatives who
scurry in and out of his hut at all hours.
As we sit beside the fire pit, Mauli reaches into
the hip pocket of his rough wool jacket, grabs a
pinch of homegrown tobacco, and deftly rolls it
into a scrap of dried corn husk. He shoves the
stubby cigarette into the coals and brings it to his
lips. As he exhales, his cloudy, bloodshot eyes re-
veal the soul of a man who is worn out. “I’m tired,
and I don’t want to do it anymore,” he says. “ The
MAP: RILEY D. CHAMPINE, NGM STAFF
SOURCES: HUMANITARIAN DATA EXCHANGE; USGS; NASA
0mi
10
0km 10
29,035 ft
8,850 m
Mt. Everest
NEPAL
CHINA
HonguArunDudhKoshiLikhuKhola
KHUMBU
Saddi
Salleri
Chheskam
Lukla
6,000 ft
1,830 m
HIMALA
YA
Honey cliffs
0mi
150
0km 150
NEPAL
ASIA
MAP
AREA
Kathmandu
CHINA
INDIA
NEPAL
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membership helped fund this project.